


apple cider and freezer burn

by yrbeecharmer



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Fluff, Karpoi (Percy Jackson) - Freeform, M/M, One Shot, Post-The Tower of Nero (Trials of Apollo), Pranks and Practical Jokes, Shadow Travel (Percy Jackson), Sleepy Cuddles, Stealing of Significant Others' Clothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27981591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yrbeecharmer/pseuds/yrbeecharmer
Summary: “Somebodypissed off McCaffrey,” Cecil says miserably from the Iris message flickering in midair, in the middle of Nico’s cabin, at two in the morning on a godsdamnThursday.“So she sent, like, a dozen karpoi to surprise attack us in the middle of the night. We’ve been trying to get rid of them, but they just keep respawning. Can you come poke them with your magic sword?” Nico stares at him.“No.”“Oh, come on! Why not?”“It’stwo in the morning!I wassleeping!”
Relationships: Nico di Angelo & Cecil Markowitz, Nico di Angelo & Meg McCaffrey, Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Comments: 18
Kudos: 277





	apple cider and freezer burn

**Author's Note:**

> wrote most of this in like 1 hour at 3 am instead of sleeping. just a silly oneshot about late-night camp shenanigans, cuddling, and Nico and Meg being friends which is very important to me because they have kind of similar backgrounds and issues and I feel like if he hadn't been understandably distracted in ToN he would see a lot of himself in her?
> 
> set a few years after Tower of Nero, doesn't really include any spoilers (aside from all these characters having survived). contains references to past parental/guardian abuse, and I guess referenced/implied underage sex since Nico and Will would be about 17 here (not explicit or depicted at all, hence no archive warning).

  


Nico is a heavy sleeper, but throw enough light and sound into a dark room and even he’ll wake up eventually. 

“What time is it?” he groans as he blinks awake in the cacophony of someone yelling his name over a lot more yelling and clanging in the background. He rubs his eyes, trying to make sense of what _felt_ like a flashlight beam shining on his eyelids, but now _looks_ more like a floating blob of very bright white light in the middle of his cabin. 

“I don’t know, like two in the morning?” says a young man’s voice. 

Nico freezes. That question was directed at Will. The person who answered was _not_ Will, who—Nico checks—is still asleep on his side behind him, his back up against the obsidian wall, the way he always sleeps when they’re both crammed into Nico’s cabin bed. 

“... _Cecil?”_ he says as his sleepy brain finally puts together what’s happening. “What’s going on?” 

“ _Somebody_ pissed off McCaffrey,” Cecil says miserably from the Iris message flickering in midair, in the middle of Nico’s cabin, at two in the morning on a godsdamn _Thursday._ “So she sent, like, a dozen karpoi to surprise attack us in the middle of the night. We’ve been trying to get rid of them, but they just keep respawning. Can you come poke them with your magic sword?” Nico stares at him. 

“No.” 

“Oh, come on! Why not?” 

“It’s _two in the morning!_ I was _sleeping!”_

“I know, but—please?” Cecil begs. “This is worse than _anything_ Katie used to do to us back in the old days, and you’re the only person who can get over here to help without running into the harpies. And, you know, your sword.” 

“I don’t care,” Nico starts to say, reaching out for said sword to slash it through the rainbow and end this stupid conversation, but before he can— 

“Wh’s going on?” Will says vaguely, stirring enough that he can sit halfway up in bed behind Nico. 

“Nothing,” Nico says quickly—not quickly enough. Too late. “Go back to sleep.” 

“Hmm.” Will shifts a little on the mattress, moving closer to the center so he can snuggle against Nico’s back where he’s sitting up on the edge of the bed. 

Nico looks back at Cecil, who’s now wearing a shit-eating grin that would be magnificent in any other situation. “Well, fuck,” he says. 

“Is that who I think it is?” Cecil says gleefully. “ _Where_ I think he is? For the _reason_ I think he is? I mean, I assume it _must_ be, cause—” 

“Of course he is,” Nico snarls. Will is breaking several camp rules right now, and Nico’s breaking at least one, and rationally he knows it probably was inevitable someone would _eventually_ catch them, and for that someone to be Cecil is a _lot_ better than it could be—but it still feels like a loss, when they’d been doing so well at sneaking around so far. 

“Right. Of course,” says Cecil. They glare at each other for a couple seconds. Well, Nico glares. Cecil continues to grin. 

“Now I _have_ to come help, don’t I,” Nico says bitterly. 

“Oh, you’re gonna be on the hook for a while,” Cecil agrees, nodding. “This is _primo_ blackmail material, especially for the golden boy of camp counselors himself.” So blackmail _him,_ not me, Nico almost says, except that he loves Will—and also, given the situation, that still wouldn’t get Nico out of the blackmailing. It takes two to tango, as he suddenly has a horrible, horrible mental image of Mr. D saying. 

“Okay, _fine,”_ he grumbles. “Let me get clothes on.” 

“And you’re not wearing _clothes!”_ Cecil says delightedly. “This gets better and better.” 

“Oh, fuck off,” Nico growls, “like anyone wears real pants to sleep.” 

“Sure, loverboy.” 

“Okay, Cecil,” Nico says, leaning in closer to the Iris-message as he gets up. “I’m putting on jeans, and then I’m coming to your cabin to _kill you.”_

“Hey, it’s better than death boy, right?” says Cecil. “I see you’re not wearing a shirt, either—” If he says anything else, Nico doesn’t hear it, because he punches the Iris-message in the face and it disintegrates. 

“Nnh.” As Nico fumbles around in the dark to pull on clothes from the floor over his underwear—jeans he can tell from the cut are his and a t-shirt he thinks it’s about 50-50 odds on—Will makes a sad sound from the bed, arms reaching out for nothing. “Nico?” 

“I’ll be right back,” Nico promises, leaning over to kiss his hair before he grabs his sword and slides into the night. 

Chaos isn’t exactly unusual for the Hermes cabin, even at two in the morning, but the scene that greets Nico there really surpasses even the worst of it. All the lights are on, including the disco strobes they have rigged up for some reason, and everyone is awake and screaming. Which means there’s a very real risk of the adjacent cabins waking up too, and Nico doesn’t want that—if Will’s siblings wake up, they’re definitely going to notice their counselor is not in his own bed. 

“You know, you’re actually a lot more ripped than you look with clothes on,” is how Cecil has decided it’s appropriate to greet him right now. Nico just shoves him hard enough to knock him on his ass and stalks into his stupid cabin, brandishing his sword. 

“Oh, thank the _gods_ you’re here!” says Alice, who is holding a very angry little karpos at arm’s length while it hisses at her and tries to bite her fingers off. 

“Isn’t that Will’s shirt?” says Julia. 

“Is it?” says Nico through gritted teeth. 

“It’s blue and it says Texas on it,” Alice points out. Julia shrugs. 

“Hey, I support stealing your boyfriend’s clothes. Game recognizes game.” She herself, Nico realizes belatedly, is wearing a too-big sweatshirt that definitely belonged to Ellis at some point. And she’s clearly too distracted to realize he’s not just wearing Will’s t-shirt, but the very same t-shirt Will was wearing yesterday. Fortunately for him. 

“Anyway, can you stab this thing already?” Alice asks. 

Nico raises his sword—then lowers it again when he actually looks at the karpos, some of his anger fading. He doesn’t like killing karpoi. They look too much like human babies, even with the leaf wings and demonic fangs, and they _act_ like babies, too, just acting out. It’s harder to feel like they _really_ deserve to have their souls consumed by Stygian iron than it is with most monsters. There are other ways to deal with them. 

Besides, Meg loves them. And Nico has always had kind of a soft spot for Meg, one that’s only grown in the years since she’s come back to camp. She’s a prickly teenage demigod with magic swords, who used to be a kid under the thumb of an abusive guardian who was only ever using her and her powers to look out for number one. Like Julia said, he thinks grimly, game recognizes game. 

“No. Different plan,” he says, sheathing his sword. “Give me that.” Alice practically drops the karpos into his hands. It wriggles and bites, but Nico manages to get it under his arm, then picks up another, and really when a third one latches onto his calf, teeth and all, it’s just being helpful. Stepping into the shadow cast by one of the bunk beds farther from the overhead light, he slips into the darkness and back out into the Demeter cabin. 

“What?” Meg sits bolt upright when Nico dumps his squirming charges in her bed. “Nico? What’s—oh, shit,” she says. “Right. Hermes.” 

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Nico says sourly. “Cecil woke me up for this shit.” 

“Ugh.” Meg flops back on her pillows. “I’m sorry. Not for them, they deserve this, but I didn’t know they’d get you involved.” 

“Look, I don’t know what they did, but isn’t siccing a dozen angry karpoi on the whole cabin in the middle of the night a _little_ extreme?” Nico regularly threatens to send skeletons after people who mildly inconvenience him. They both know this. That’s not the point. 

“Seems fair to me,” Meg says, shrugging casually, every inch a blithe fifteen-year-old asshole. “But whatever. You can just bring them to me, I’ll stop.” 

“Fine.” In the dark, Nico goes back to the porch of the Hermes cabin, where Cecil has gotten to his feet. 

“Um, _ow,”_ he says. “Were _you_ gonna explain it to Will if you’d made me break something?” 

“As Will would say, stop complaining,” Nico tells him, and goes back in for more karpoi. 

When he gets back to the Demeter cabin, the three he brought before are snuggling up with Meg like kittens to a mama cat. She’s stroking their wispy cornsilk hair and smiling, and for a moment, if he squints, the little crop demons almost look sweet. Nico hands her two more. 

“You’re going to be drowning in karpoi in a minute,” he points out. Meg shrugs. 

“Better people have died worse ways.” 

“Tell me about it,” Nico says, matching her dark humor note for note. They smile at each other grimly. This is exactly where the soft spot comes from. He swings back over to Hermes. 

“Okay, I get why you’re mad,” Cecil says in the split second Nico is on the porch before he walks back into the cabin. Three more karpoi delivered to Meg. They’re all jostling each other for maximum cuddle access, and she’s giggling; it’s a wonder none of _her_ siblings have woken up yet. “But,” Cecil says the next time he comes back, like the thought has continued unbroken, “it’s my gods-given right as your friend to give you guys shit about stuff like this.” 

“So give us shit in the light of day, when you’re not also asking me to go out of my way to help you with your own cabin’s bullshit at two in the morning,” says Nico. He somehow manages to wrangle all four remaining karpoi into his arms and get them over to the Demeter cabin in one piece. Well, the karpoi are four pieces. _He’s_ in one piece, is the point. 

“Thanks,” says Meg. “I’m glad they’re all okay.” 

“Of course,” says Nico. “Hope you get some sleep.” 

“It’s probably a lost cause,” Meg says blissfully. “But you too.” 

“Less of a lost cause, or I really am going to murder Cecil. See you in the morning.” He leaves her with the karpoi burrowing under her comforter to snuggle. 

“Okay,” says Cecil when Nico makes one last visit to the Hermes cabin porch, just to make sure he didn’t miss any karpoi in the rush. He’s starting to feel a little drag on the shadow-travel, the roughness and slowing-down and the chill in his bones that means he’s close to overextending himself. “That’s fair. Thanks for helping, though, and seriously, man, you’re _hot_ now, Will’s a lucky guy—” 

“Good _night,_ Cecil,” Nico tells him, and finally melts back into the darkness that will lead him to Cabin Thirteen. 

He ditches the jeans, but keeps the t-shirt on when he climbs back into bed. If he presses that much bare skin up against Will's when he’s in this condition it’ll probably wake his boyfriend up and freak him out, what with his whole healing supersense deal. As it is, Will stirs and snuggles into him, murmuring sleepy nonsense. 

“Nico?” 

“Mm-hmm. I’m back.” 

“Okay?” 

“Yeah, basically.” 

“Basically?” He can feel Will frown against his shoulder. He runs warm fingers down Nico’s bare arm. “Gods, Nico,” he says, sounding much more awake now. “What the hell happened?” 

“Cabin Eleven had a problem. It’s Cecil’s fault, take it up with him. I just need to sleep,” Nico assures him. 

“Mmkay.” Will wraps the arm around his waist, drawing them tight together—the only way they can lie facing each other in this stupid bed—and presses his face into Nico’s t-shirt. Which is technically his own shirt, though not for long, Nico has decided. It’s _really_ soft. “Why do you smell like apple cider?” 

“Huh?” It takes a second before Nico realizes—“oh. Apples. Of course.” _That’s_ what kind of karpoi they were. 

“Like, apple cider with freezer burn,” Will elaborates. 

“Karpoi. And shadow travel.” That would be the freezer burn. 

“Did they bite you?” 

“I’m not bleeding.” Anymore. Will sighs. 

“Patient is noncompliant,” he mumbles, “verging on hostile.” 

“Doctor loves it.” 

“Yeah, he does.” Will’s lips are warm and slow with sleep when he looks up and kisses Nico. Then he wrinkles his nose. “You don’t taste like apples. Just the freezer burn.” _He_ tastes like he’s halfway to morning breath, but _Nico_ wasn’t going to whine about it. 

“It’s not like I bit the karpoi back,” he says. “Though maybe that would be a good strategy. Teach them the error of their ways.” Will just shakes his head, nuzzling into Nico’s shirt again. “Go back to sleep,” Nico tells him. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine in the morning.” 

“Roll over,” Will suggests. Once he lets go enough to let him and shifts back on the mattress, Nico complies, letting Will pull him back in tight with an arm across his chest. 

“Cecil realized you’re here, by the way, and he’s gonna be using that knowledge to blackmail you now,” he supposes he should warn him. 

“Whatever,” Will says into his hair. “Worth it.” He taps his fingers just over Nico’s heart and kisses the back of his neck. If someone had told Nico three years ago, when the only person he would willingly touch was Hazel, that he’d sleep best with Will wrapped around him like a godsdamn sloth or something—he wouldn’t have laughed in their faces, probably, because he wasn’t really in the habit of laughing then, but he wouldn’t have believed it. 

But here they are. Will’s frame doesn’t quite envelop him like he used to when he’d hug him back then, since Nico’s grown taller, but he’s still so _warm._

Not nearly enough hours from now, he knows, he’ll be rudely awakened again by Will climbing over him at sunrise to sneak back to Cabin Seven in the narrow window between when the harpies go off duty and his siblings start waking up. That’s how it always goes when they do this. For now, though, he’s already drifting off. 

Annoyingly, Nico is pretty sure he dreams about apple orchards. 

  


**Author's Note:**

> @yrbeecharmer on tumblr.


End file.
